Information overload is a growing concern as the amount of information sources available and received electronically, for example, through the Internet has exponentially gown. People face the challenge of keeping track of numerous streams of information from a variety of sources, such as email messages from work colleagues and friends, news stories, status updates from networking sites, and changes to shared electronic files, such as documents in content management systems. Each of the information sources can require visiting a different Web site or tool, including input of a separate username and password to access each source.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) was developed as a way to avoid the time and effort needed to manually visit each information source individually. RSS is Web-based format for publishing content and allows feed reader applications to gather information published using RSS from a variety of sources and to present the information to a user for monitoring and review. The feed reader application regularly collects information updates from sources, or feeds, subscribed to by the user of the feed reader. Unfortunately, subscribing even to a few feeds can quickly lead to feed overload. Reviewing hundreds or thousands of feed items can be daunting and identifying any feed items of particular interest to the user can be lost in the noise.
Conventional feed readers, such as Google Reader and FriendFeed, allow users to narrow the amount of feed items to review by showing only the feeds of particular people or from particular sources, but not in combination. Another approach, suggested by Marian Dörk, et al., in VisGets: Coordinated Visualizations for Web-based Information Exploration and Discover, IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Vol. 14, No. 6, 1205-1212, 2008), organizes feeds along three dimensions, time, location, and tags within a faceted browser interface. However, the approach assumes that the time, location, and tag information are already associated with the feed item, while, practically, many feed items do not include tag data about the content of the feed item.
Accordingly, there is a need for management of information feeds which includes identifying topics from the content of the information feeds.